The Bosatsu’s Lament
We are about to lose our beauty
and our friends.
We have wasted time
in the heat of time’s desert.
In broken homes
just before they break.
At kitchen tables past bedtime,
where people whisper oh my God,
is this the way
the story is supposed to be?
We try
to be as agile as vacuum.
But our weight is too ugly,
our will, too strong.
No one will miss us,
we try to believe.
This was the title poem of my third chapbook:
The Dead Thoreau
This was the title poem of my third chapbook:
The Dead Thoreau
I am lying under the ground.
There is soil on top of me, and grass above that.
It is not a time for snow, because roots
are busily burrowing through my skin.
Where there is no light,
there are other ways to think of time.
I am never the first to know
when the sun is shining, nor when the picnic is canceled
because of rain.
The summer squall means little,
save for that exquisite wetness, indistinguishable
from an afternoon of sweet gentle showers.
Beneath the hawk and sparrow,
my flight becomes the revolution of the earth.
Tomorrow will arrive when it is ready.
When the sun finally seeps through my limbs
I need think of nothing but the world I am creating
as I wait for what will happen next.
Zealots
A woman
her gray hair up in a scarf
shrieks something about “the foreigners
taking everything over.”
Her lipstick is the only color
on a day where ice and salt
wick from the asphalt into soles
and overcoats trapped in the muted deluge
of frantic umbrellas.
In the days of Noah
her flesh would have nourished the benthic
snails and nematodes
awarded unthinking dominion
over every mountain, every soul. Above,
laughter at a drunken father’s nakedness--
baying of donkeys, rats gnawing through
floors.
She grips herself like tablets of stone--
Again, the foreigners
are taking everything over. Passing mortals
avert their eyes
as Moses must have
when first approaching the burning bush.
How dare she call herself chosen!
Would that a truck would hit her,
let the color bleed from her lips, more salt
to thaw the ice, the road! Then,
as apostates argue,
let us search the sky for doves, a single
twig, the promise of virgin land.
